The Debian Project is pleased to announce that registration is now open
for DebConf14, which will take place in Portland, Oregon, USA from Saturday,
August 23 to Sunday, August 31, 2014. As in previous years, three different
registration options will be available: Basic, Professional
and Corporate. To request food, accommodation or travel sponsorship,
you must be registered by Thursday, May 15, 2014. After this date,
registrations will still be accepted, but requests for sponsorship
will not. For more detailed information about how to register,
please see the separate
announcement from the DebConf team.

In past years, DebConf has been preceded by a separate DebCamp event,
where developers can gather before the conference and collaborate in person
on Debian. This year the team is trying a different approach, with a
longer conference period allowing for blocks of talks to be mixed with
blocks of coding time throughout the week. More information about the
schedule will be made available when the Call for Papers is posted in
the near future.
Furthermore, as mentioned in the
latest bits from the DPL mail, there is also an opportunity for Debian
teams to organise sprints around DebConf. Teams who are interested should
follow the process documented on the wiki page.

Philipp Kern
announced
the removal of the SPARC port from testing, as of April 26. The main reasons
were lack of porter commitment, problems with the toolchain and continued
stability issues. The fate of SPARC in unstable has not been decided yet; it
may be removed unless people commit to working on it. Discussion about this
should take place on bug report #745938.
SPARC support was officially introduced in Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 (code name
slink) back in March 1999 and was featured in eight releases.

Regular security support for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0, squeeze,
will be terminated on May 31, 2014. A new suite named squeeze-lts
and containing only two architectures, i386 and amd64, will be made available
with support extended until February 2016 to provide a five year support cycle.
A reminder that the
scheduled freeze date for Jessie has been set for six months from now
on Wednesday, November 5, 2014.
In the same message, Niels Thykier reported on the
Release
Team's architecture meeting, held on April 12, 2014, about the status of
the architectures and considering their suitability for Jessie.
Recursive auto-removals have returned, with warnings to the
maintainers of the involved packages prior to removal.

Jordi Mallach sent
bits from the Debian sprint where the Debian GNOME core team and systemd Debian
maintainer gathered in Antwerp, Belgium. Over two days, the ten participants
discussed a variety of topics to do with systemd and GNOME integration in
Debian. After some improvement in the packaging workflow for systemd, version
208 of systemd has been uploaded to experimental.
The GNOME team initiated several transitions, improved the
status
of GNOME 3.12 in Debian,
and discussed the feasibility of having Debian Jessie shipped with 3.14.
The participants also jointly discussed how to configure and start display
managers, and may have come to a working solution to this problem,
which is complicated by the number of packages providing display
managers and init systems.
They also used this opportunity to sign new, stronger GnuPG keys in order to
help the
effort to abandon older and weaker keys.
The participants thank the sponsors, most notably INUITS, which provided the
venue, and Debian and its donors for covering the travel expenses
for five of the attendees. A few of the attendees were kindly sponsored by
their employers.

The KDE team needs more manpower, and
sent
a call for help. People interested
in helping with tasks from triaging bugs to packaging KDE applications and
editing the team's documentation are invited to join the #debian-qt-kde IRC
channel on irc.debian.org, or write a message to the team's
mailing list.

On behalf of the Debian FTP Masters, Scott Kitterman
formally announced
that source packages [are considered] to be part of the Debian system and as
such all files in source packages must come with their source as required by the
Debian Free Software Guidelines
and be distributable under a free license.

The FreedomBox project is a
community project to develop, design and promote personal servers running free
software for private, personal, communications.
Petter Reinholdtsen
announced
on his blog that all packages used by the FreedomBox project are
now available in Debian unstable.
Petter describes a couple of methods to test
the FreedomBox setup from a Debian installation or a Debian installation CD.

The DebConf organisation team met on May 3 to kick off the
organisation of DebConf15, which will take place in Heidelberg, Germany.
Minutes
of the meeting are available, as well as a
blog
post with
details of the prospective venue.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party?
Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events?
Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our
talks page?
Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

Debian's Backports Team released an advisory for the package
openssh.
Please read it carefully and take the proper measures.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list (and the separate backports
list, and stable updates
list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.